Sentence-free basic outlining
Topic outline's simplicity is deceiving

Basic outlining is a matter of arranging information on an invisible grid. The simplest looking of these basic organizational tools is the topic outline.

The topic outline may be a formal outline, with the Roman numerals students find distasteful, or an informal one that uses just the grid to show which ideas go together.

The distinguishing feature of the topic outline is that every bit of information is a sentence fragment. The topic outline contains no complete sentences: it's entirely composed of topics.

Students think that preparing a topic outline is easier than a sentence outline because they don't have to write sentences. However, they often find that lack of sentences is a big problem when they begin writing papers using those outlines.

Limitations of topic outlines

The topic outline indicates the points the writers will write about, but it does not indicate what the writers will say on those points. That means writers can't determine from the topic outline:

• Whether their main points support their thesis.

• Whether they have overlapping points.

• Whether they have enough evidence to support their main points.

These ambiguities make the topic outline less than ideal as a planning tool for student writers. Instead of saving work for students, it merely pushes the work further into the writing process.

You can see some sample topic outlines on an English language arts writing prompt and compare them to sentence outlines responding to the same prompt. That comparison should reveal why student writers find it easier to write from a sentence outline than from a topic outline.